"Economic pain is real and
not going anywhere—four decades of corporate, neoliberal policies and
privatization, deregulation, free trade, and austerity have made sure of
that," said Naomi Klein upon accepting the Sydney Peace Prize. (Photo:
AAP)

Canadian
author and activist Naomi Klein accepted the 2016 Sydney Peace Prize in Australia on
Friday, delivering a searing speech that reflected on Donald Trump's
presidential victory in the United States and the factors that allowed it to
happen.

"If
there is a single overarching lesson in the Trump victory, perhaps it is this:
Never, ever underestimate the power of hate, of direct appeals to power over
the 'other'...especially during times of economic hardship," said Klein,
whose books include The Shock Doctrineand This Changes
Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.

Calling
Trump the "demagogue of the moment," Klein went on to identify other
lessons to "take from our barely three-day-old reality."

One, she
said, is that "economic pain is real and not going anywhere—four decades
of corporate, neoliberal policies and privatization, deregulation, free trade,
and austerity have made sure of that."

Another,
she continued, is that "only a bold and genuinely re-distributive agenda
has a hope of speaking to that pain and directing it where it belongs—the
politician-purchasing elites who benefited so extravagantly from the auctioning
off of public wealth, the looting of our land, water, and air, and the
deregulation of our financial system."

But to
create such an agenda requires the learning of an even "deeper
lesson," Klein said.

"If
we want to defend against the likes of Donald Trump—and every country has their
own Trump—we must urgently confront and battle racism and misogyny in our
culture, in our movements, and in ourselves. This cannot be an afterthought, it
cannot be an add-on. It is central to how someone like Trump can rise to
power."

"Neither
can we tell ourselves that when we fight for peace and economic justice, it
will benefit black people and Indigenous people the most because they are the
most victimized in our current system of economic inequality, state repression,
and climate change," she said. "There is too long and too painful a
track record of left and liberal movements leaving workers of color and
Indigenous people and women and their labor out in the cold. To build a truly
inclusive movement, there needs to be a truly inclusive vision that starts
with, and is led by, the most brutalized and excluded."

In
separate interviews given while she was in Australia to accept the prize, and
in an op-ed published Thursday, Klein specifically lambasted Trump's dangerous climate policies—including his vow
to withdraw the U.S. from the landmark Paris Agreement aimed at limiting global
warming.

"Outside
the U.S., we need to start demanding economic sanctions in the face of
this treaty-shredding lawlessness," Klein wrote.

Indeed,
she described Trump's plans to double-down on
domestic fossil fuel production while cutting aid to poor nations impacted by
rising sea levels as "immoral and atrocious."

"And
I believe there has to be an international response that's very, very
swift," she said. "You have to send a signal that you cannot trash
these hard won, hard negotiated international treaties and face no
consequences."

This work
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

“Their
votes confirmed what we all knew is that Washingtonians are tired of being
treated like second-class citizens,” Mayor Muriel Bowser said at a Wednesday
afternoon news conference.

”There will
be many twists and turns ahead ― just like there have been good days and not so
good days in DC’s history,” she said in an accompanying statement, “but we take
this monumental step forward together, we can be sure that DC’s best days are
ahead of us.”

One twist
is that, should the District become a state, two more seats would be added to
the Senate. According to The Washington Post, this has drawn resistance from
Republicans, as those seats would likely be held by Democrats, who have an
overwhelming majority in the District.

That means
Tuesday’s big win for the Republicans, in both the presidency and the U.S.
House, will likely make the petition’s final approval by Congress a dead issue.

As part of
the draft constitution[3] voted
on Tuesday, residents would elect a governor rather than a mayor, as well as a
21-seat state legislature instead of a city council. State lines would have to
be drawn, with the White House, the Capitol and the National Mall remaining in
a federal district, CBS Washington reported. A final state constitution would
be reviewed by residents before approval, Bowser stated.

The draft
constitution listed the new state’s name as New Columbia, but the name isn’t
final, DCist reported in October.

D.C.
residents have long petitioned for statehood. Since 2000, the district’s
standard license plates have included the phrase: “Taxation without
representation.”

This phrase
refers to D.C. residents’ lack of a voting representative in the U.S. House, as
well as the city not having representation in the U.S. Senate. Congress
maintains authority over the city, including the power of final approval over
legislation from the city council.

Then-President
Bill Clinton placed the statement license plates on his presidential motorcade
during his last few weeks in office. In 2001, his successor, George W. Bush,
was sworn in and had the plates removed soon after. They were not reattached
again until 2013, during President Barack Obama’s second term in office, The
Washington Post reported.

“President
Obama has lived in the District now for four years, and has seen first-hand how
patently unfair it is for working families in D.C. to work hard, raise children
and pay taxes, without having a vote in Congress,” the White House said in a
statement at the time.

President-elect
Donald Trump was asked during his campaign last year[4] for
his response to D.C.’s bid for statehood on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He said
that he would do “whatever’s best” for the people of D.C. and that “something
would be done that everybody would be happy,” NPR reported.

"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs